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SALMON, FILLETS OF (a l'Americaine)
Cut the flesh of the salmon into neat fillets, dip these into beaten egg, drain, and roll them in fine bread-curmbs; fry in hot fat till they are lightly browned, put them on blotting-paper to free them from fat, serve on a napkin, and garnish with parsley. Send clear gravy to table with them. Time to fry, eight to fifteen minutes, according to the thickness. Probable cost, salmon, 1s. to 1s. 4d. per pound when plentiful. Sufficient, two pounds of salmon for four or five persons.
A plain egg-and-crumb fry, the sort of entry Cassell's used to fill out a long list of salmon dishes. Almost nothing here needs changing except the cooking time.
- The frying time is the hingeEight to fifteen minutes will overcook thin crumbed fillets, though the recipe does tie its range to thickness. Fillets an inch thick want roughly three to four minutes a side in hot fat. Note that a 125-130F centre, with the flakes still translucent at the core, is below the 145F usually recommended for fish.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat." For crumbed fillets that means 350-375F: hot enough to set the coating on contact, not so hot that the crumbs colour before the fish is warm through. A dropped crumb should sizzle briskly and rise.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper on a rack. Draining on a rack rather than flat on the paper keeps the underside crisp.
- Fillets, in the Victorian senseCassell's means neat squared-off pieces cut from the flesh, not the whole side-of-fish fillet sold today. Cut a thick centre-cut piece into portions of even thickness so they finish together.
- Clear gravyAn unthickened, well-flavoured stock, strained and skimmed of fat, reduced until it has body. Not a flour-thickened gravy and not a roux sauce; in Victorian books 'clear gravy' generally meant a meat stock.
- Serving on a napkinA folded linen napkin on the dish absorbed stray fat and was standard for fried food in this period. A warmed plate does the same job with less laundry.
- Yield and costTwo pounds for four or five works out at roughly six to eight ounces of salmon a head, near a modern portion. The price note (1s to 1s 4d a pound "when plentiful") reflects a seasonal wild fishery, not a farmed year-round supply.
The label à l'américaine was applied loosely in nineteenth-century kitchens and rarely meant much about America. It is most associated in French practice with a dish of tomato, brandy and shallot — the sauce famous from lobster américaine — but usage drifted, and English compilers such as Cassell's attached it to anything from a crumbed fry to a dish sent up with a plain brown gravy. The term is usually said to have come out of Parisian restaurant cooking in the middle of the nineteenth century, though the details are not firmly established, and its resemblance to à l'armoricaine (from Brittany) has been argued over without resolution. What the entry does record faithfully is the place of salmon in a Victorian household book: priced by the pound, cheap enough to fry in crumbs when the run was heavy, and common enough in season to warrant many separate entries in a dictionary of cookery.